Russell Skelton has won the Walkley Book Award for Long Form Journalism for his book King Brown Country: The Betrayal of Papunya.

The culmination of five years work, the book deals with indigenous disadvantage in the remote Central Australian community of Papunya.

"It's one of those sort of stories, you go out, you do it, and suddenly it has a life of it's own," says Skelton, who is a contributing editor to The Age.

Skelton visited Papunya in 2005 and says he was shocked by what he discovered.

"It was a place that was poorly managed, money had gone missing...people described it to me as the petrol sniffing capital of Australia, so the question for me, having come back from [covering] the Iraq War...was how is this happening in my own country?"

ABC journalist Katrina Bolton also won a Walkley for her radio documentary "Drink, Death and Dollars," which looks at the relationship between retail outlets and alcohol related deaths in Central Australia.